


i will wade out

by alias2335



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:08:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23870614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alias2335/pseuds/alias2335
Summary: She recreates herself.Alive.Even if it takes a thousand years...
Relationships: Kohaku/Rin (InuYasha), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	i will wade out

> _i will wade out_

> _till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers_

Kagura’s body disintegrates and her mind expands so much she looses all sense of self. 

She is, quite literally, the wind. Or a part of it at least. Her soul- or her mind, or whatever it is that makes her _Kagura_ -

scatters. 

She travels across the sea to the americas, to the mainland, to the continent to the south. A part of her becomes entangled in a storm that goes high up into the stratosphere, another joins the North Wind. 

A part of Kagura follows around Kikyō, Inuyasha, Sesshōmaru, Kohaku, Kanna... even Naraku.

A part of her stays, always, dancing over the field of her physical death.

In tiny, almost imperceptible pieces, she finds her way into a human village and plays with children. She’s part of the wind that pushes a young boy off a cliff and into a river where he drowns, she helps spread the seeds of many trees. She becomes part of a great storm that leaves animals, humans and demons, all cowering and hiding. She spreads the smell of cooking far out into a field, where a young man works. He lifts his head to smell, and turns in that direction. 

She’s caught up in the falling mist and turbulence of a waterfall, and she swishes through the leaves of trees. 

She dances in the skies. 

Kagura the demon is dead, but _Kagura, the wind_ lives on in a thousand different places and touches a thousand different people. 

> _I will take the sun in my mouth_

> _and leap into the ripe air_

She is there when Kanna dies, when Kikyō dies, when Naraku dies. 

She perscieves it, but doesn’t understand- too spread out to actually form thoughts about it, to actually care about the things her mortal body cared about.

She is there when Sango gives birth, when Kagome and Inuyasha marry, when Kohaku takes off with Kirara. 

And every time one of them mentions her she twingles, and almost, but not quite, _not_ _yet_ \- begins to regain consciousness. 

Kagura is free- so free that she has no body and no purpose and no direction.

And free to laugh and cry and _feel_ \- even if she has no body. 

Sometimes, she realizes that she _is_. She realizes that she _thinks_ , that there is an essence to her.

Then it goes away and again she is only a breeze, or a sigh, or a storm. 

Moments of being _Kagura_ start to become longer than moments of being wind.

Sometimes, all it takes for her to remember is a feather...

Sometimes it's golden eyes.

> _Alive_

_with closed eyes_

> _to dash against darkness_

The first time she actively influences an event is to help Kohaku- or rather, his weapon, to go _faster_ and cut _deeper_ into a demon terrorizing some human village. 

She has retained her personality and essence for a while now. Months, she thinks, since the last time she disintegrated into too many pieces of conscience to think clearly.

That is not to say she is complete. If she lets herself expand- she can feel herself in different places still. 

But. 

There is a totality to her now, and that totality follows Kohaku, more often than not. He is a grown man, taller and surer than she ever knew him to be, and in the solitude of her existence she can admit she cares for him. The boy she died for. 

It’s boredom more than anything that makes her influence her surroundings. She doesn’t think it will even work. 

And Kohaku doesn’t notice, mostly because the gust Kagura controls is so weak that not even a bug would have felt the difference. 

But Kagura is surprised to see it work- she’s done something real to change the world, tiny as it may be. 

She has control of herself (even if there is no physical self to control) and the wind around her.

She realizes that she can try, each time with a bit more success- to _exist_.

.

The first time she talks, in her own voice, and not in the screams of a storm or the whispers of trees in a breeze - it's to tell a little boy in a meadow where his lost kitten is. 

He screams and runs away. 

Understandable of course. She is nothing more than wind, her voice simply a modification of how the wind moves, the vibrations in the air a specific length and form that help her achieve audible speech.

Learning to speak again is easier than learning her body. 

The first time the wind actually condenses a little into her shape, the first time she tries to force herself a new body of wind, intangible as it is-

to take on a physical shape- it’s only the image of half her head and chest, completely insubstantial. 

It takes a long, long time for her to manage to conjure the image of her entire body. But it's easy enough once she realizes it's simply like creating mirages in a dessert... it's about manipulating how light passes through her. 

Unfortunately, she’s forgotten certain things. The exact shade of red of her eyes, the length of her spine…

Remembering her body, _every curve, every hair, every freckle_ is necessary. When she forgets something she feels incomplete. That doesn't help her remember what it is that she's forgotten.

The spider on her back though… that was never hers. That stays in the past with the miasma and the death and the cage. 

> _in the sleeping curves of my body_

> _Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery_
> 
> _with chasteness of sea-girls_.

The first person from her old life she visits is Kagome.

By then, Kagome is maybe 60 years old, and Kagura can only maintain a unified body for a few minutes. 

But after years of working and recreating herself she's _scared_ , and so she goes for a visit.

Kagome is a miko, as powerful and knowledgable as Kikyō ever was, and Kagura is afraid of death again, of being torn from this world and into the next before actually regaining the ability to be. 

More than once, a monk has stumbled upon her, invisible though she is, and tried to purify her. Thankfully, they always misunderstand what she is, and the purification is always aimed at the ground. Never at the sky, though now she believes it's only a matter of time. 

Kagome doesn't recognize her at first, after all, 45 years is a human lifetime, but she is kind enough to not purify Kagura on sight, and kind enough to confirm that her essence, what makes her _Kagura_ , has yōki.

Kagome can't be sure how much yōki, since it feels incomplete, and yet all around. She's not sure how Kagura should go around trying to be tangible again, now that she has discovered how to be visible. 

Kagura’s form dissapears halfway through the conversation, but using her voice is not as taxing as maintaining a shape, so she continues to stay and to ask questions.

Finally, Kagome remembers her, and advices her to talk to InuYasha... Tessaiga changes shape and mass, maybe he can explain how.

Inuyasha is unchanged in appearance and temperament, so of course he's useless. He, at least, remembers her as soon as he sees her, and out of the misplaced loyalty the group developed for her after her betrayal to Naraku and death, he leads her to Tōtōsai, who created Tessaiga.

She can’t maintain form around him either, so every few minutes Inuyasha stops, uncertainly, asking awkwardly if she’s still around. 

It’s funny to startle him with a gust of wind or a whisper in his ear for a while, but Inuyasha is as gullible as ever, and eventually she grows bored, simply nudging him forward every time he falters, moving him along before he speaks. 

Tōtōsai is not useless.

To make the wind become _skin, muscles, bones_ … it is difficult, it takes time, and it takes yōki, says the old demon. 

More yōki than she has, or more, at least, than what she's gathered together, he says.

She is weaker now, as a demon, than even regular Oni. But it's because her essence is still scattered. Because everything that makes her _Kagura_ is not together. 

She should, at the very least, be able to gather up as much yōki as she had in her previous body, Tōtōsai says. 

Then, in that weird, meandering way of his, he mentions that she’s probably much more powerful, now. 

It’s not _every_ demon that transforms in stead of dying. 

Heartened, she thanks him, thanks Inuyasha, asks him to thank Kagome for her, and is off. 

> _Will i complete the mystery_

> _of my flesh_

Gathering her yōki begins with learning to _sense_ her yōki. 

It becomes about smell. 

She follows the wind, across the sea to the americas, to the mainland, to the continent to the south. She follows herself up into the stratosphere, towards the great North Wind, into more than one human village, to a waterfall, through forests. To the sight of Naraku’s death. And finally, to the field of her own demise. 

It takes time... so much time, but she feels stronger, now. 

Not once during her travels has she tried to become physical again. But she tries it now. 

She wills the wind around her to transform. When before she could control no more than a gust of wind, now a hurricane of _her_ follows her will and becomes bones first, then organs, muscles, skin, hair, nails. 

She stands, naked, where she died. 

Were she has been reborn. 

She wills the wind into the shape of a kimono, no longer red, though she always liked red… this one is white, like Kanna’s. A new beginning.

She wills earnings onto her ears, diamonds, not rubies, and a feather, for her hair. 

And then she dances. 

And she is happy. 

Around her, a storm rages, and animals, demons and humans scatter, fearing a natural disaster, or fearing a powerful demon. 

_Kagura is both_.

They are right to fear her.

> _I will rise_

> _After a thousand years_
> 
> _lipping_

> _flowers_

She visits Kohaku, again. 

He is an old man now, 80 years old, grumpy, surrounded my a new tribe of demon hunters, both his children and his sisters; and their combined grandchildren, and great grandchildren all around. 

Kohaku recognizes her at once. 

After trying to kill her, thinking her a face-changing demon, he settles down and hears her story. By the end of it, he laughs, hugs her and smiles, and she sees the freckled child she gave her first life for.

He tells her his own life story after Naraku’s defeat, of his search for redemption, of falling in love, of forgiving himself, of creating this new tribe together with his sister and with her husband and his wife. Of a life of hardships, yes, but full of love. He tells her he is happy to have seen her once more, and she is, too. 

His wife comes in, 77, and still with the same hairstyle she had when she was a child, though her hair is white now, no longer brown. She recognizes Kagura as well. 

“Hello, Rin” says the demoness, and the old lady smiles at her, hugs her, offers her food, drink, a bed to stay, for as long as she wishes. 

She accepts, if only to remember what it felt like to have a body, to eat, to sleep. 

She is _auntie_ to the children, _kaze-sama_ to the adults, and _Kagura_ to Kohaku and Rin. 

She watches them together. 

They move slowly, but always aware of each other. They hold hands, share secret smiles, small kisses. They argue about small things, they laugh, they share family gossip. She watches them, and for the first time in more than half a century, her heart… _her heart_ , _hers_ and no one else’s… it yearns. 

After weeks of staying with them she approaches Rin with a question that has been with her for longer than she cares to admit. 

“Where is Sesshōmaru?”

Rin shrugs, cleaning weapons. 

“To be honest, I don’t know where he's gone. He used to come visit, often. Once a month, when I was still young. Then once a year, when my children started growing up… He came to give me comfort when one of them died, but he didn’t revive my child, and I didn’t ask him too...

"I haven’t seen him in 12 years… I think it's difficult for him, to see me like this. He hasn’t changed at all since that first day I saw him, but I’ve aged as humans do, and he never liked humans, much. But I have a way of contacting him, if I’m ever in need, if you want to see him.” 

Kagura thanks her, but doesn’t ask. She feels… not afraid, but nervous, hesitant. 

She, too, visited Sesshōmaru before she created her new body. But she’d...stopped, some point between gaining her voice and now. 

His golden eyes are as vivid in her mind as if he were in front of her.

And Kagura can almost understand his hesitance to visit the old woman that he had taken is as his young daughter. Time passes for some, but for others...

She leaves. 

But before she does, she separates a part of herself, invisible, minuscule, undetectable by most, and leaves it in the village. 

A way to contact her. 

She won’t admit she’s stolen the idea. 

> _i will wade out_

She has _adventures_.

She travels the world, sometimes on her feather, sometimes as the breeze. She fights both demons and men who challenge her. They are not challenges. 

She finds Shippō, the young kitsune that accompanied Inuyasha what seems like a lifetime ago. He’s up to two tails now, and his appearance has changed. He looks like a child on the verge of adolescence, the appearance he’ll maintain for another century, if he’s careful, she supposes.

He’ll be powerful, if he survives.

So they travel together for a time. 

Neither is lonely, exactly. Yōkai are solitary creatures, for the most part, but they can be sociable, under the right circumstances. Kitsune are naturally mischievous, and Kagura likes causing chaos, so they go well together. 

They run into Kōga, the wolf yōkai, and after a fight in which Kagura holds back, for the sake of the other’s pride, the yōrō tribes formally forgive her for her role in decimating their eastern tribe. 

Kagura secretly rolls her eyes, but endures, happy to cut the ties of hate that still bind her to Naraku. Kagura’s enemies are her own. _Should be_ her own. Her old master is dead and not even his bones are left in this world. 

He will be forgotten, by time, and by all. 

Even by her. 

> _with closed eyes_

Rin whispers into the wind that Kohaku has died, asleep and smiling. 

Kagura hears her, half a continent away, and she returns, with Shippō, to pay her respects.

The kitsune yōkai is a mess. Now only Rin survives, of his original human companions. 

For Kohaku's funeral, everyone dresses in white, except for Kagura, who dresses in red. 

Kohaku touched many lives, and his funeral is crowded. Rin accepts all condolences with a sad but genuine smile.

Kagura sees Inuyasha again. He looks older, but not yet old… accompanied by his human children, who look much older than he is, and their human children. Shippō goes with them, after the funeral, and she does not protest. 

She sees Jaken, who has also aged, and Ah-Un the dragon, but she doesn’t see Sesshōmaru. 

He comes when no one else is around, when everyone else has left, when there is only Rin, in her now empty bed, in her empty house. 

Kagura feels it when the daiyōkai arrives. A shiver goes through her, responding to the yōki she suddenly smells in the air. She turns around and gives them their privacy, flying out to take a spot in the woods, outside the village for the night. 

The moon is out, appropriately, in a crescent moon shape. 

She sleeps, because she can, secure in this village. Knowing there is no danger to her here. 

She wakes at dawn, to golden eyes. 

> _And set my teeth in the silver of the moon_

**Author's Note:**

> Kagura is my favorite Inuyasha character, and she was done. so. dirty!
> 
> Anyways, I read this poem by E.E. Cummings and every single line stood out to me as a Kagura story.


End file.
